Digital Bill of Rights

Technological innovation has unleashed a transformation as significant as the Industrial Revolution. While this information revolution has empowered consumers, it has generated new questions and concerns regarding privacy, free speech, limits on the government’s power to tax, and the regulation of disruptive technologies. For this reason, the FreedomWorks Digital Bill of Rights seeks to ensure that the protections afforded to all Americans by the U.S. Constitution carry forward to the cyberworld.

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It didn't take long for the intelligence community's best friends in Congress to invoke last week's terrorist attack in Paris, in which 17 people were brutally killed at the offices of a satirical magazine, in the contentious and continuing debate over the National Security Agency's unconstitutional domestic spying programs.

The National Security Agency's vast spying apparatus has been a tremendous hurdle for the United States' still-burgeoning tech industry. Many lawmakers on Capitol Hill are, however, unconcerned with the economic impact of these surveillance programs, making it difficult for meaningful reforms to work their way through Congress.

Section 213 of the PATRIOT Act creates what is known as “sneak and peek” warrant. Law enforcement is authorized to conduct a search without first notifying the subject of the search. After 9/11, law enforcement insisted that this measure was necessary to investigate and prevent future terrorist attacks “without tipping off the terrorists.”

The Senate is expected to vote on cloture for the USA Freedom Act tonight. There's good and bad parts of the bill. FreedomWorks hopes to see a debate on the floor of the Senate on NSA reform. We are encouraging members to offer amendments to strengthen the bill and curb unconstitutional spying.

The Senate appears to be taking steps to reform the National Security Agency's unconstitutional domestic spying programs. The National Journal reports that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has filed for cloture on the stronger version of the USA FREEDOM Act introduced in July by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT).

Since June 2013, Americans have been aware the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, through which it collects the telephony metadata of virtually every person with a cell phone in the United States. Intelligence officials claim authority for this privacy violating program through Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and a misinterpretation of a 1979 Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland. But what much of the public doesn't know about are violations of privacy occurring under Section 213 of the PATRIOT Act, the so-called "sneak-and-peek" provision.

There is no more powerful of a tool in today's political discourse than the Internet. It has decentralized the flow of information by allowing Americans to do their own research on the issues concerning them and their families as well as comparing candidates who are running for local, state, and federal office. Democrats on the Federal Election Commission (FEC), however, are looking to, for the first time, regulate online political speech.

A growing number of economists are describing the current slump as a form of secular stagnation, where diminishing outlets for capital investment have slowed economic growth, reduced the demand for labor and stalled the economic recovery. While the technology sector remains one of the few areas of the economy where innovation and growth continue at a rapid pace, the Federal Communications Commission is moving forward with a series of new rules that may shackle this important part of the economy. From new mandates for municipal broadband to redefining what broadband means, to proposals to turn the Internet into a common carrier, the FCC is working to reshape how Americans connect to the Internet.

Back in March, the U.S. government announced that it would relinquish control over ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This is the organization that is responsible for managing how domain names are assigned on the internet, and until now, it has been under fairly tight supervision from the Commerce Department.